Why is it that we all know Osama Bin Laden? Because he blew up a (couple of, actually) big huge things that we hold dear. So did Luke, what with the Death Star and all.
At the point when Luke becamse famous enough that the Emperor/Vader would have heard of him, he would also be either old enough to fend for himself or protected by infamy. Also remember that Tattooine is the equivalent of bumfuck nowhere in the Star Wars galaxy...the Republic's reach doens't encompass the planet. A single kid on a moisture farm isn't likely to spark interest. Combined with Anakin no longer being called Skywalker, who would know?
We may as well do the "science" of Sex and the City or the "science" of American Idol. Really.
While I won't really argue with you, the premise I think you're forgetting is that SatC and Idol are both supposed to take place not only in this galaxy, but on this planet at this time. Hell, Idol is a reality show, meaning it's supposed to be real life.
Star Wars, OTOH, is a "galaxy far, far away," so it's conceivable that the conditions we know as common here (oxygen, gravity, etc) are quite different a great distance away. Anytime you come up with a "Universe" (in the sense of an alternate world, like Middle Earth) you're at liberty to fudge a few numbers and laws of physics...figuring those out, based on what we think we know, has been the goal of many a geek throughout time.
Fer crying out loud, a princess is a princess only because she can document her lineage and everyone will know it!
Uh, Bail is a senator during the prequels. I would assume, based on that fact and the fact that on Naboo the royal family isn't a hereditary thing, that Bail and his wife win an election at some point, making them the leaders of their people, and give them the title of King/Queen, making their children princes/princesses. Think elective monarchy, or some bastardization thereof.
Also remember that Padme looked pregnant when she was buried/mourned publicly in the streets. Vader doesn't realize the children survived until the Emperor tells him, probably because Luke gains notoriety for blowing up the Death Star in IV and has his previously famous last name brought back into the limelight.
Not necessarily. Jedi aren't fortune tellers, psychics or the like. Their use of the force amounts to hyperactive senses, similar to some animals whose senses are heightened well above ours. That being said, Leia didn't know she was Anakin/Vader's daughter, so she wouldn't have been giving off anything detectable that would have tipped Vader off.
He's a Whill, though it's never been announced in the movies. He's also over 800 years old in Episode III, so I wouldn't look for a significant change only 100 years earlier.
If you're so dependant on the NYT articles, why not create a repository based on their RSS feeds? Automating the download, archiving and indexing of those documents wouldn't be that hard.
Newspapers are partly paid for by advertising, but they wouldn't exist without paid subscribers.
I think you might want to recheck that. My subscription goes to pay the person delivering the newspaper, not the newspaper itself. Newspapers run almost solely on advertising revenue, with the subscription price (which is ridiculously low) going to pay the people who deliver it.
In that sense, newspapers are very similar to cable news...I pay for cable service in order to get my news just like I pay for delivery service.
Mod parent up! Isn't this what we've been asking for for years? "Don't make filesharing illegal!! Make the illegal filesharing (more) illegal and leave the apps alone!!" We just got what we wanted, backpats all around.
Never take a poll seriously unless it comes complete with the questions asked. Any poll that just reports "X number of people agree with Z" falls into the category of lies, damn lies and statistics.
I've been reading some of the posts over at the Elder Scrolls:Oblivion forums, and I gotta say, this game looks impressive. Larger than Morrowind in land mass along with updated graphics, but mostly it's the NPCs I'm interested in. There were only two drawbacks that I could name in Morrowind...the journal, the NPC interaction. The journal they clearly fixed. The NPCs are supposed to have much better AI this time, along with voice acting for every spoken word, facial expressions and an AI approaching a personality.
Judging by the posts I've seen, everybody is either joking about or speculating why it got a PG-13 rating...the Episode III book IS out, and most of it has been posted to newsgroups online. It's received a PG-13 rating for all the violence (there are at least 5 bad ass lightsabers fights I can think of, 4 of which involve someone dying, off the top of my head) and the scenes involving Anakin's skin getting melted off.
It isn't that the Media has a Liberal bias, it is that the World has a Liberal bias, and the Media is reporting on that.
Okay, that's an assanine statement you just made. If the media just reported on the goings-on of the world, and those goings-on happened to be positive for the liberal agenda, I would agree. But that's not the case. As it happens, the issues in question are those which liberals/conservatives have differing opinions on. Look at how the media portrays those topics:
- Taxes. Always cited is that the top earners received a huge tax break under Bush. It's rarely mentioned that not only do they pay the predominant share of taxes, but they pay a much larger percentage than anyone else. Even with the Bush tax cuts, we have a very progressive tax system.
- Abortion. Those against abortion are always depicted as religious zealots, when a good many just don't think it's right. Contrast this with...
- Death penalty. Those for it are depicted as either religious zealots or barbarians, whereas those against it are fair-minded and seeking equality. Never mind that race has to get brought up in nearly every discussion, with citations about the skewed minority population of death row.
- Poor/entitlement/welfare. You'll see the angle of lost jobs or government irresponsibility, but not drug habits, personal fiscal irresponsibility or lack of motivation.
- Anything about women. Larry Summers was castigated for suggesting that women may just not have an interest or not be as good overall as men at science and math. You won't hear the media follow that with a study showing that the lowest paying and most dangerous jobs employ almost 100% men.
Read 'Bias' or 'The Myth of Male Power' or 'Why Men Earn More' for other examples.
The media in the USA is insane. They're the single biggest lobby group in America today and not only that but they're also in the director's chair because they control what politician's get elected.
While I would agree with your first sentence on the sanity of the media, but your second sentence would be proven incorrect by Bush being reelected. The media was pretty deadset against his reelection and it still happened.
Except that SS is shielded because it's paid for with its own set of taxes...payroll taxes. The next president may have to cut a lot of social programs, but cutting SS won't do them any good...they'll still have the same amount of money in the kitty (ignoring the surplus SS funds going to buy bonds, ofcourse).
Once you get word-of-mouth advertisement happening, then you can start making your money from playing live shows. Cut out the big 5 altogether goddammit!!! All they are is a marketing machine. BFD.
Frankly, with today's quality of music, I think the Big 5 are being overworked trying to make crap sound good. I'm not sure what the solution to *that* problem is, but I doubt iTunes is it.
My shoulders were hunched in apprehension reading your post, waiting to see the sea of naysayers disputing it. I was pleasantly surprised that you didn't receive any.
You're dead on, and it's something that most people, especially on the left, don't want to admit. "Us change them? That's absurd!!" Why? We have the most peaceful, most egalitarian, and most influential government around. Other countries would kill for the economy that we complain about. The current "human rights alert" is about whether a publicly funded college can fire a professor over, it's debatable, either an essay he wrote or whether or not he's incompetant in his subject area.
Westernization essentially means revolutionizing their government, economic and social systems. I'm not saying it's impossible, but we've got an *internal* fight ahead of us just trying to prove that this is the right thing to do, without mentioning the fight about how it should be done.
--trb
Re:Typical assinine name-calling
on
State of the Union
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A reason to care:
When people retire, if they have no money, what do they do? Do we say go live in the gutter, as you propose? Our gutters would fill up quick. I'm normally pretty uncaring about people who make rotten decisions in life, but I realize that one way or another, our tax dollars are going to be spent taking care of these people. I'd just as soon have EVERYONE get taxed, then have it returned with nice earned interest when I'm older. I'm already doing this with my personal retirement, why not add this on?
I've always thought if we could force every person age 18 and above to open a friggin investment account with a modest, regular deposit, it would help them in the long run by making them watch their money and see how it grows. Privitized accounts will help this.
--trb
Re:liar, liar, pants on fire
on
State of the Union
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
liar, per:
Social Security actuaries project the trust fund will last until 2042. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts that date at 2052.
You're apparently confusing "liar" with "person telling me the truth but I don't want to think about it because it's a really long ways off". The fact that everyone predicts SS will, in fact, backs up his statement. The question is, and always has been, when.
"conservative" and "stock funds" do not go together
Do you have a retirement account? In most diversified plans, one is a conservative growth fund. Mine lost very, very little throughout the stock plunge and started doing better much, much sooner...that's what it's designed for, to be recession proof.
after all, he obviously has.
Why don't you just call him a "poo-poo head"?
now that the election is over, it's time to cater to religious zealots
He backed the marriage amendment when it was voted on DURING his reelection campaign. To say "now that the election is over..." is disingenuous and ignorant of (recent) history.
--trb
Re:Typical assinine name-calling
on
State of the Union
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
SS won't be solvent forever...it *will* start running a deficit and eventually be bankrupt. How is pursuing change a bad thing? You can argue that his plan sucks, and plenty of people do, but letting a faulty program run its course is being irresponsible.
The only time he even comes close (in the inauguration address) he (or his speechwriters) equates freedom with making money.
Can you cite examples for me? Free enterprise, maybe, but I don't think I ever saw dollar signs in his eyes during a speech.
Bush has defined freedom in multiple ways...deciding how your country will run through Democratic elections is one of them, certainly the one pertinent to Iraq.
Languages aside, SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) is a great library for graphics/sound/network programming. Simple, easy to learn, cross platform. For a class project, it should do the trick.
I'd suggest C++ for programming languages, but that's probably just because it's what I've used for years.
How else can you explain the fact that Everyone games are actually not appropriate for everyone? Instead they are only appropriate for children six and older.
That would be because most kids under six would have a difficult time playing most any game. Games for kids 3-6 are designated EC, Early Childhood.
And certainly Grand Theft Auto, which is rated mature for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content and Use of Drugs, should actually be an Adults Only title.
No, it's for anyone mature enough to handle the concepts involved. GTA may involve adult situations (strippers, pimping, etc) but they don't graphically depict any of it. The amount of humor in the game alone should qualify it for a Mature rating instead of Adult.
Does adding drug references to a game somehow make it more acceptable for kids to play? What about sex? If you put sex, drugs and violence in the same game does it get an Everyone rating?
Hyperbole aside, I can't explain this because I haven't played the games in question. Maybe someone else can. Aside from this one possible point, the editorial looks like someone spewing garbage. If you want an in depth analysis of the game, read a review, don't expect a rating system to cover it.
Let me clarify my complaint...this story has nothing to do with party affiliation, unless the AP is trying to draw your attention to the fact a Republican is removing violent video games from an institution, which would be my contention.
I'm not too worried about the Slashdot summary, it was taken directly from the story. While you say it's commonplace for the AP articles to distinguish party affiliation, note how often they do it for Republicans and not Democrats...it might surprise you.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that we all know Osama Bin Laden? Because he blew up a (couple of, actually) big huge things that we hold dear. So did Luke, what with the Death Star and all.
At the point when Luke becamse famous enough that the Emperor/Vader would have heard of him, he would also be either old enough to fend for himself or protected by infamy. Also remember that Tattooine is the equivalent of bumfuck nowhere in the Star Wars galaxy...the Republic's reach doens't encompass the planet. A single kid on a moisture farm isn't likely to spark interest. Combined with Anakin no longer being called Skywalker, who would know?
--trb
We may as well do the "science" of Sex and the City or the "science" of American Idol. Really.
While I won't really argue with you, the premise I think you're forgetting is that SatC and Idol are both supposed to take place not only in this galaxy, but on this planet at this time. Hell, Idol is a reality show, meaning it's supposed to be real life.
Star Wars, OTOH, is a "galaxy far, far away," so it's conceivable that the conditions we know as common here (oxygen, gravity, etc) are quite different a great distance away. Anytime you come up with a "Universe" (in the sense of an alternate world, like Middle Earth) you're at liberty to fudge a few numbers and laws of physics...figuring those out, based on what we think we know, has been the goal of many a geek throughout time.
--trb
Fer crying out loud, a princess is a princess only because she can document her lineage and everyone will know it!
Uh, Bail is a senator during the prequels. I would assume, based on that fact and the fact that on Naboo the royal family isn't a hereditary thing, that Bail and his wife win an election at some point, making them the leaders of their people, and give them the title of King/Queen, making their children princes/princesses. Think elective monarchy, or some bastardization thereof.
Also remember that Padme looked pregnant when she was buried/mourned publicly in the streets. Vader doesn't realize the children survived until the Emperor tells him, probably because Luke gains notoriety for blowing up the Death Star in IV and has his previously famous last name brought back into the limelight.
--trb
Not necessarily. Jedi aren't fortune tellers, psychics or the like. Their use of the force amounts to hyperactive senses, similar to some animals whose senses are heightened well above ours. That being said, Leia didn't know she was Anakin/Vader's daughter, so she wouldn't have been giving off anything detectable that would have tipped Vader off.
--trb
He's a Whill, though it's never been announced in the movies. He's also over 800 years old in Episode III, so I wouldn't look for a significant change only 100 years earlier.
--trb
If you're so dependant on the NYT articles, why not create a repository based on their RSS feeds? Automating the download, archiving and indexing of those documents wouldn't be that hard.
--trb
Newspapers are partly paid for by advertising, but they wouldn't exist without paid subscribers.
I think you might want to recheck that. My subscription goes to pay the person delivering the newspaper, not the newspaper itself. Newspapers run almost solely on advertising revenue, with the subscription price (which is ridiculously low) going to pay the people who deliver it.
In that sense, newspapers are very similar to cable news...I pay for cable service in order to get my news just like I pay for delivery service.
--trb
Mod parent up! Isn't this what we've been asking for for years? "Don't make filesharing illegal!! Make the illegal filesharing (more) illegal and leave the apps alone!!" We just got what we wanted, backpats all around.
Or am I missing something?
--trb
Or is this just RAID-1 backup without the read performance boost?
--trb
Never take a poll seriously unless it comes complete with the questions asked. Any poll that just reports "X number of people agree with Z" falls into the category of lies, damn lies and statistics.
--trb
I've been reading some of the posts over at the Elder Scrolls:Oblivion forums, and I gotta say, this game looks impressive. Larger than Morrowind in land mass along with updated graphics, but mostly it's the NPCs I'm interested in. There were only two drawbacks that I could name in Morrowind...the journal, the NPC interaction. The journal they clearly fixed. The NPCs are supposed to have much better AI this time, along with voice acting for every spoken word, facial expressions and an AI approaching a personality.
I'm stoked for this game to come out.
--trb
Judging by the posts I've seen, everybody is either joking about or speculating why it got a PG-13 rating...the Episode III book IS out, and most of it has been posted to newsgroups online. It's received a PG-13 rating for all the violence (there are at least 5 bad ass lightsabers fights I can think of, 4 of which involve someone dying, off the top of my head) and the scenes involving Anakin's skin getting melted off.
--trb
It isn't that the Media has a Liberal bias, it is that the World has a Liberal bias, and the Media is reporting on that.
Okay, that's an assanine statement you just made. If the media just reported on the goings-on of the world, and those goings-on happened to be positive for the liberal agenda, I would agree. But that's not the case. As it happens, the issues in question are those which liberals/conservatives have differing opinions on. Look at how the media portrays those topics:
- Taxes. Always cited is that the top earners received a huge tax break under Bush. It's rarely mentioned that not only do they pay the predominant share of taxes, but they pay a much larger percentage than anyone else. Even with the Bush tax cuts, we have a very progressive tax system.
- Abortion. Those against abortion are always depicted as religious zealots, when a good many just don't think it's right. Contrast this with...
- Death penalty. Those for it are depicted as either religious zealots or barbarians, whereas those against it are fair-minded and seeking equality. Never mind that race has to get brought up in nearly every discussion, with citations about the skewed minority population of death row.
- Poor/entitlement/welfare. You'll see the angle of lost jobs or government irresponsibility, but not drug habits, personal fiscal irresponsibility or lack of motivation.
- Anything about women. Larry Summers was castigated for suggesting that women may just not have an interest or not be as good overall as men at science and math. You won't hear the media follow that with a study showing that the lowest paying and most dangerous jobs employ almost 100% men.
Read 'Bias' or 'The Myth of Male Power' or 'Why Men Earn More' for other examples.
--trb
The media in the USA is insane. They're the single biggest lobby group in America today and not only that but they're also in the director's chair because they control what politician's get elected.
While I would agree with your first sentence on the sanity of the media, but your second sentence would be proven incorrect by Bush being reelected. The media was pretty deadset against his reelection and it still happened.
--trb
Except that SS is shielded because it's paid for with its own set of taxes...payroll taxes. The next president may have to cut a lot of social programs, but cutting SS won't do them any good...they'll still have the same amount of money in the kitty (ignoring the surplus SS funds going to buy bonds, ofcourse).
--trb
Once you get word-of-mouth advertisement happening, then you can start making your money from playing live shows. Cut out the big 5 altogether goddammit!!! All they are is a marketing machine. BFD.
Frankly, with today's quality of music, I think the Big 5 are being overworked trying to make crap sound good. I'm not sure what the solution to *that* problem is, but I doubt iTunes is it.
--trb
My shoulders were hunched in apprehension reading your post, waiting to see the sea of naysayers disputing it. I was pleasantly surprised that you didn't receive any.
You're dead on, and it's something that most people, especially on the left, don't want to admit. "Us change them? That's absurd!!" Why? We have the most peaceful, most egalitarian, and most influential government around. Other countries would kill for the economy that we complain about. The current "human rights alert" is about whether a publicly funded college can fire a professor over, it's debatable, either an essay he wrote or whether or not he's incompetant in his subject area.
Westernization essentially means revolutionizing their government, economic and social systems. I'm not saying it's impossible, but we've got an *internal* fight ahead of us just trying to prove that this is the right thing to do, without mentioning the fight about how it should be done.
--trb
A reason to care:
When people retire, if they have no money, what do they do? Do we say go live in the gutter, as you propose? Our gutters would fill up quick. I'm normally pretty uncaring about people who make rotten decisions in life, but I realize that one way or another, our tax dollars are going to be spent taking care of these people. I'd just as soon have EVERYONE get taxed, then have it returned with nice earned interest when I'm older. I'm already doing this with my personal retirement, why not add this on?
I've always thought if we could force every person age 18 and above to open a friggin investment account with a modest, regular deposit, it would help them in the long run by making them watch their money and see how it grows. Privitized accounts will help this.
--trb
liar, per:
Social Security actuaries project the trust fund will last until 2042. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts that date at 2052.
You're apparently confusing "liar" with "person telling me the truth but I don't want to think about it because it's a really long ways off". The fact that everyone predicts SS will, in fact, backs up his statement. The question is, and always has been, when.
"conservative" and "stock funds" do not go together
Do you have a retirement account? In most diversified plans, one is a conservative growth fund. Mine lost very, very little throughout the stock plunge and started doing better much, much sooner...that's what it's designed for, to be recession proof.
after all, he obviously has.
Why don't you just call him a "poo-poo head"?
now that the election is over, it's time to cater to religious zealots
He backed the marriage amendment when it was voted on DURING his reelection campaign. To say "now that the election is over..." is disingenuous and ignorant of (recent) history.
--trb
SS won't be solvent forever...it *will* start running a deficit and eventually be bankrupt. How is pursuing change a bad thing? You can argue that his plan sucks, and plenty of people do, but letting a faulty program run its course is being irresponsible.
--trb
The only time he even comes close (in the inauguration address) he (or his speechwriters) equates freedom with making money.
Can you cite examples for me? Free enterprise, maybe, but I don't think I ever saw dollar signs in his eyes during a speech.
Bush has defined freedom in multiple ways...deciding how your country will run through Democratic elections is one of them, certainly the one pertinent to Iraq.
--trb
Languages aside, SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) is a great library for graphics/sound/network programming. Simple, easy to learn, cross platform. For a class project, it should do the trick.
I'd suggest C++ for programming languages, but that's probably just because it's what I've used for years.
--trb
Was the Kotaku editorial serious?
How else can you explain the fact that Everyone games are actually not appropriate for everyone? Instead they are only appropriate for children six and older.
That would be because most kids under six would have a difficult time playing most any game. Games for kids 3-6 are designated EC, Early Childhood.
And certainly Grand Theft Auto, which is rated mature for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content and Use of Drugs, should actually be an Adults Only title.
No, it's for anyone mature enough to handle the concepts involved. GTA may involve adult situations (strippers, pimping, etc) but they don't graphically depict any of it. The amount of humor in the game alone should qualify it for a Mature rating instead of Adult.
Does adding drug references to a game somehow make it more acceptable for kids to play? What about sex? If you put sex, drugs and violence in the same game does it get an Everyone rating?
Hyperbole aside, I can't explain this because I haven't played the games in question. Maybe someone else can. Aside from this one possible point, the editorial looks like someone spewing garbage. If you want an in depth analysis of the game, read a review, don't expect a rating system to cover it.
--trb
Let me clarify my complaint...this story has nothing to do with party affiliation, unless the AP is trying to draw your attention to the fact a Republican is removing violent video games from an institution, which would be my contention.
--trb
I'm not too worried about the Slashdot summary, it was taken directly from the story. While you say it's commonplace for the AP articles to distinguish party affiliation, note how often they do it for Republicans and not Democrats...it might surprise you.
--trb